1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a plasma treatment apparatus, a printing apparatus, a printing system, and a method of producing a printed matter.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventional ink-jet recording devices have been centered on a shuttle system in which a head reciprocates in a widthwise direction of a recording medium represented by paper or a film, and thus have rarely improved a throughput according to high-speed printing. Thus, in recent years, to cope with the high-speed printing, one-pass system has been proposed in which a recording medium has been recorded at a time with multiple heads put side by side so as to cover the full width thereof.
The one-pass system is advantageous to speeding up, but has a problem, such as beading or bleeding, that, since time intervals at which neighboring dots are jetted are short and since the neighboring dots are jetted before ink jetted in dots previously permeates a recording medium, the union of the neighboring dots (hereinafter referred to as “jetted dot interference”) occurs, and a quality of image is lowered.
Further, in ink-jet system based printing apparatuses, when printing is conducted on a non-permeable medium or a slow-permeable medium such as a film or coated paper, there is also a problem in that neighboring ink dots flow and unite to cause an image defect called beading or bleeding. As a conventional technique for addressing this, a method of taking measures to previously applying a pre-coating agent to the medium and to enhance aggregability and fixability of ink or a method of using ultraviolet (UV) curable ink is already known.
However, in the aforementioned method of previously applying the pre-coating agent to the printing medium, moisture of the pre-coating agent in addition to moisture of the ink also needs to be evaporated and dried, and a longer drying time or a large drying device is required. Further, in the method of using the pre-coating agent that is a supply product or the relatively expensive UV curable ink, there is a problem in that a printing cost is raised.
Therefore, there is a need for a plasma treatment apparatus, a printing apparatus, a printing system, and a method of producing a printed matter that are capable of producing a high-quality printed matter while inhibiting an increase in cost.